I made a clumsy gesture and knocked a glass ashtray off a table. It smashed into fragments.
I picked up the pieces and Major Phillpot helped me.
“I expect Mrs. Lee’s quite harmless really,” said Ellie. “I was very foolish to have been so scared.”
“Scared, were you?” His eyebrows rose again. “It was as bad as that, was it?”
“I don’t wonder she was afraid,” I said quickly. “It was almost more like a threat than a warning.”
“A threat!” He sounded incredulous.
“Well, it sounded that way to me. And then the first night we moved in here something else happened.”
I told him about the stone crashing through the window.
“I’m afraid there are a good many young hooligans about nowadays,” he said, “though we haven’t got many of them round here—not nearly as bad as some places. Still, it happens, I’m sorry to say.” He looked at Ellie. “I’m very sorry you were frightened. It was a beastly thing to happen, your first night moving in.”
“Oh, I’ve got over it now,” said Ellie. “It wasn’t only that, it was—it was something else that happened not long afterwards.”
I told him about that too. We had come down one morning and we had found a dead bird skewered through with a knife and a small piece of paper with it which said in an illiterate scrawl, “Get out of here if you know what’s good for you.”
Phillpot looked really angry then. He said, “You should have reported that to the police.”
“We didn’t want to,” I said. “After all, that would only have put whoever it is even more against us.”
“Well, that kind of thing has got to be stopped,” said Phillpot. Suddenly he became the magistrate. “Otherwise, you know, people will go on with the thing. Think it’s funny, I suppose. Only—only this sounds a bit more than fun. Nasty—malicious—It’s not,” he said, rather as though he was talking to himself, “it’s not as though anyone round here could have a grudge against you, a grudge against either of you personally, I mean.”
“No,” I said, “it couldn’t be that because we’re both strangers here.”
“I’ll look into it,” Phillpot said.
He got up to go, looking round him as he did.
“You know,” he said, “I like this house of yours. I didn’t think I should. I’m a bit of an old square, you know, what used to be called old fogey. I like old houses and old buildings. I don’t like all these matchbox factories that are going up all over the country. Big boxes. Like beehives. I like buildings with some ornament on them, some grace. But I like this house. It’s plain and very modern, I suppose, but it’s got shape and light. And when you look out from it you see things—well, in a different way from the way you’ve seen them before. It’s interesting. Very interesting. Who designed it? An English architect or a foreigner?”
I told him about Santonix.
“Mm,” he said, “I think I read about him somewhere. Would it have been in House and Garden?”
I said he was fairly well known.
“I’d like to meet him sometime, though I don’t suppose I’d know what to say to him. I’m not artistic.”
Then he asked us to settle a day to come and have lunch with him and his wife.
“You can see how you like my house,” he said.
“It’s an old house, I suppose?” I said.
“Built 1720. Nice period. The original house was Elizabethan. That was burnt down about 1700 and a new one built on the same spot.”
“You’ve always lived here then?” I said. I didn’t mean him personally, of course, but he understood.
“Yes. We’ve been here since Elizabethan times. Sometimes prosperous, sometimes down and out, selling land when things have gone badly, buying it back when things went well. I’ll be glad to show it to you both,” he said, and looking at Ellie he said with a smile, “Americans like old houses, I know. You’re the one who probably won’t think much of it,” he said to me.
“I won’t pretend I know much about old things,” I said.
He stumped off then. In his car there was a spaniel waiting for him. It was a battered old car with the paint rubbed off, but I was getting my values by now. I knew that in this part of the world he was still God all right, and he’d set the seal of his approval on us. I could see that. He liked Ellie. I was inclined to think that he’d liked me, too, although I’d noticed the appraising glances which he shot over me from time to time, as though he was making a quick snap judgment on something he hadn’t come across before.
Ellie was putting splinters of glass carefully in the wastepaper basket when I came back into the drawing room.
“I’m sorry it’s broken,” she said regretfully. “I liked it.”
“We can get another like it,” I said. “It’s modern.”
“I know! What startled you, Mike?”
I considered for a moment.
“Something Phillpot said. It reminded me of something that happened when I was a kid. A pal of mine at school and I played truant and went out skating on a local pond. Ice wouldn’t bear us, silly little asses that we were. He went through and was drowned before anyone could get him out.”
“How horrible.”
“Yes. I’d forgotten all about it until Phillpot mentioned about his own brother.”
“I like him, Mike, don’t you?”
“Yes, very much. I wonder what his wife is like.”
We went to lunch with the Phillpots early the following week. It was a white Georgian house, rather beautiful in its lines, though not particularly exciting. Inside it was shabby but comfortable. There were pictures of what I took to be ancestors on the walls of the long dining room. Most of them were pretty bad, I thought, though they might have looked better if they had been cleaned. There was one of a fair-haired girl in pink satin that I rather took to. Major Phillpot smiled and said:
“You’ve picked one of our best. It’s a Gainsborough, and a good one, though the subject of it caused a bit of trouble in her time. Strongly suspected of having poisoned her husband. May have been prejudice, because she was a foreigner. Gervase Phillpot picked her up abroad somewhere.”
A few other neighbours had been invited to meet us. Dr. Shaw, an elderly man with a kindly but tired manner. He had to rush away before we had finished our meal. There was the Vicar who was young and earnest, and a middle-aged woman with a bullying voice who bred corgis. And there was a tall handsome dark girl called Claudia Hardcastle who seemed to live for horses, though hampered by having an allergy which gave her violent hay fever.
She and Ellie got on together rather well. Ellie adored riding and she too was troubled by an allergy.
“In the States it’s mostly ragwort gives it to me,” she said—“but horses too, sometimes. It doesn’t trouble me much nowadays because they have such wonderful things that doctors can give you for different kinds of allergies. I’ll give you some of my capsules. They’re bright orange. And if you remember to take one before you start out you don’t as much as sneeze once.”
Claudia Hardcastle said that would be wonderful.
“Camels do it to me worse than horses,” she said. “I was in Egypt last year—and the tears just streamed down my face all the way round the Pyramids.”
Ellie said some people got it with cats.
“And pillows.” They went on talking about allergies.
I sat next to Mrs. Phillpot who was tall and willowy and talked exclusively about her health in the intervals of eating a hearty meal. She gave me a full account of all her various ailments and of how puzzled many eminent members of the medical profession had been by her case. Occasionally she made a social diversion and asked me what I did. I parried that one, and she made half-hearted efforts to find out whom I knew. I could have answered truthfully “Nobody,” but I thought it would be well to refrain—especially as she wasn’t a real snob and didn’t really want to know. Mrs. Corgi, whose proper name I hadn’t caught, was much more thorough in h
er queries but I diverted her to the general iniquity and ignorance of vets! It was all quite pleasant and peaceful, if rather dull.
Later, as we were making a rather desultory tour of the garden, Claudia Hardcastle joined me.
She said, rather abruptly, “I’ve heard about you—from my brother.”
I looked surprised. I couldn’t imagine it to be possible that I knew a brother of Claudia Hardcastle’s.
“Are you sure?” I said.
She seemed amused.
“As a matter of fact, he built your house.”
“Do you mean Santonix is your brother?”
“Half-brother. I don’t know him very well. We rarely meet.”
“He’s wonderful,” I said.
“Some people think so, I know.”
“Don’t you?”
“I’m never sure. There are two sides to him. At one time he was going right down the hill…People wouldn’t have anything to do with him. And then—he seemed to change. He began to succeed in his profession in the most extraordinary way. It was as though he was—” she paused for a word—“dedicated.”
“I think he is—just that.”
Then I asked her if she had seen our house.
“No—not since it was finished.”
I told her she must come and see it.
“I shan’t like it, I warn you. I don’t like modern houses. Queen Anne is my favourite period.”
She said she was going to put Ellie up for the golf club. And they were going to ride together. Ellie was going to buy a horse, perhaps more than one. She and Ellie seemed to have made friends.
When Phillpot was showing me his stables he said a word or two about Claudia.
“Good rider to hounds,” he said. “Pity’s she’s mucked up her life.”
“Has she?”
“Married a rich man, years older than herself. An American. Name of Lloyd. It didn’t take. Came apart almost at once. She went back to her own name. Don’t think she’ll ever marry again. She’s anti man. Pity.”
When we were driving home, Ellie said: “Dull—but nice. Nice people. We’re going to be very happy here, aren’t we, Mike?”
I said: “Yes, we are.” And took my hand from the steering wheel and laid it over hers.
When we got back, I dropped Ellie at the house, and put away the car in the garage.
As I walked back to the house, I heard a faint twanging of Ellie’s guitar. She had a rather beautiful old Spanish guitar that must have been worth a lot of money. She used to sing to it in a soft low crooning voice. Very pleasant to hear. I didn’t know what most of the songs were. American spirituals partly, I think, and some old Irish and Scottish ballads—sweet and rather sad. They weren’t pop music or anything of that kind. Perhaps they were folk songs.
I went round by the terrace and paused by the window before going in.
Ellie was singing one of my favourites. I don’t know what it was called. She was crooning the words softly to herself, bending her head down over the guitar and gently plucking the strings. It had a sweet-sad haunting little tune.
Man was made for Joy and Woe
And when this we rightly know
Thro’ the World we safely go…
Every Night and every Morn
Some to Misery are born.
Every Morn and every Night
Some are born to Sweet Delight,
Some are born to Sweet Delight,
Some are born to Endless Night…
She looked up and saw me.
“Why are you looking at me like that, Mike?”
“Like what?”
“You’re looking at me as though you loved me….”
“Of course I love you. How else should I be looking at you?”
“But what were you thinking just then?”
I answered slowly and truthfully: “I was thinking of you as I saw you first—standing by a dark fir tree.” Yes, I’d been remembering that first moment of seeing Ellie, the surprise of it and the excitement….
Ellie smiled at me and sang softly:
“Every Morn and every Night
Some are born to Sweet Delight,
Some are born to Sweet Delight,
Some are born to Endless Night.”
One doesn’t recognize in one’s life the really important moments—not until it’s too late.
That day when we’d been to lunch with the Phillpots and came back so happily to our home was such a moment. But I didn’t know then—not until afterwards.
I said: “Sing the song about the Fly.” And she changed to a gay little dance tune and sang:
“Little Fly,
Thy Summer’s play
My thoughtless hand
Has brushed away.
Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?
For I dance
And drink, and sing
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.
If thought is life
And strength and breath
And the want
Of thought is death;
Then am I
A happy fly
If I live
Or if I die.”
Oh, Ellie—Ellie….
Fifteen
It’s astonishing in this world how things don’t turn out at all the way you expect them to!
We’d moved into our house and were living there and we’d got away from everyone just the way I’d meant and planned. Only of course we hadn’t got away from everyone. Things crowded back upon us across the ocean and in other ways.
First of all there was Ellie’s blasted stepmother. She sent letters and cables and asked Ellie to go and see estate agents. She’d been so fascinated, she said, by our house that she really must have a house of her own in England. She said she’d love to spend a couple of months every year in England. And hard on her last cable she arrived and had to be taken round the neighbourhood with lots of orders to view. In the end she more or less settled on a house. A house about fifteen miles away from us. We didn’t want her there, we hated the idea—but we couldn’t tell her so. Or rather, what I really mean is even if we had told her so, it wouldn’t have stopped her taking it if she’d wanted to. We couldn’t order her not to come there. It was the last thing Ellie wanted. I knew that. However, while she was still awaiting a surveyor’s report, some cables arrived.
Uncle Frank, it seemed, had got himself into a jam of some kind. Something crooked and fraudulent, I gathered, which would mean a big sum of money to get him out. More cables passed to and fro between Mr. Lippincott and Ellie. And then there turned out to be some trouble between Stanford Lloyd and Lippincott. There was a row about some of Ellie’s investments. I had felt, in my ignorance and credulity, that people who were in America were a long way away. I’d never realized that Ellie’s relations and business connections thought nothing of taking a plane over to England for twenty-four hours and then flying back again. First Stanford Lloyd flew over and back again. Then Andrew Lippincott flew over.
Ellie had to go up to London and meet them. I hadn’t got the hang of these financial things. I think everybody was being fairly careful in what they said. But it was something to do with the settling up of the trusts on Ellie, and a kind of sinister suggestion that either Mr. Lippincott had delayed the matter or it was Stanford Lloyd who was holding up the accounting.
In the lull between these worries Ellie and I discovered our Folly. We hadn’t really explored all our property yet (only the part just round the house). We used to follow up tracks through the woods and see where they led. One day we followed a sort of path that had been so overgrown that you couldn’t really see where it was at first. But we tracked it out and in the end it came out at what Ellie said was a Folly. A sort of little white ridiculous temple-looking place. It was in fairly good condition so we cleared it up and had it painted and we put a table, and a few chairs in it, and a divan and a corne
r cupboard in which we put china and glasses, and some bottles. It was fun really. Ellie said we’d have the path cleared and made easier to climb and I said no, it would be more fun if no one knew where it was except us. Ellie thought that was a romantic idea.
“We certainly won’t let Cora know,” I said and Ellie agreed.
It was when we were coming down from there, not the first time but later, after Cora had gone away and we were hoping to be peaceful again, that Ellie, who was skipping along ahead of me, suddenly tripped over the root of a tree and fell and sprained her ankle.
Dr. Shaw came and said she’d taken a nasty sprain but that she’d be able to get about again all right in perhaps a week. Ellie sent for Greta then. I couldn’t object. There was no one really to look after her properly, no woman I mean. The servants we had were pretty useless and anyway Ellie wanted Greta. So Greta came.
She came and she was a great blessing of course to Ellie. And to me as far as that went. She arranged things and kept the household working properly. Our servants gave notice about now. They said it was too lonely—but really I think Cora had upset them. Greta put in advertisements and got another couple almost at once. She looked after Ellie’s ankle, amused her, fetched things for her that she knew she liked, the kind of books and fruit and things like that—things I knew nothing about. And they seemed frightfully happy together. Ellie was certainly delighted to see Greta. And somehow or other Greta just didn’t go away again…She stopped on. Ellie said to me:
“You don’t mind, do you, if Greta stays on for a bit?”
I said, “Oh no. No, of course not.”
“It’s such a comfort having her,” said Ellie. “You see, there are so many sort of female things we can do together. One’s awfully lonely without another woman about.”
Every day I noticed Greta was taking a bit more upon herself, giving orders, queening it over things. I pretended I liked having Greta there, but one day when Ellie was lying with her foot up inside the drawing room and Greta and I were out on the terrace, we suddenly got into a row together. I can’t remember the exact words that started it. Something that Greta said, it annoyed me and I answered sharply back. And then we went on, hammer and tongs. Our voices rose. She let me have it, saying all the vicious, unkind things she could think of, and I pretty well gave her as good as I was getting. Told her she was a bossy, interfering female, that she’d far too much influence over Ellie, that I wasn’t going to stand having Ellie bossed about the whole time. We shouted at each other and then suddenly Ellie came hobbling out on the terrace looking from one to the other of us, and I said: